Jennifer Marohasy

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Pilliga-Goonoo Lock-up Announced

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The NSW Government has finally made a decision on the Pilliga-Goonoo forests and the decision is likely to decimate local timber communities.

Click here (jpg 136kb) to see a picture of 24 Pilliga West State forest, one of the WCA so-called iconic areas.

The decision to ban logging over a further 350,000 hectares will have implications for biodiversity. While the government has described the decision as achieving ‘permanent conservation’ of the iconic forests, the reality is that without active management there can be no conservation.

150 years ago, areas now thick with cypress were grassland or open box woodland with cypress controlled by local aboriginals through the use of fire.

The forests that the government now wants to ‘conserve’ are a recent phenomenon and have developed with the local timber industry – koala and barking owls habitat enhanced through responsible forestry practices.

The Government has announced that workers who lose their jobs will be offered either new jobs or receive redundancy payments of $72,000.

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The picture at the above link is from Ted Haymen. He sent it to me with the following explaination, “This is compartment 24 Pilliga West State Forest, one of the WCA so called icon areas. It would have once been open box woodland but has been invaded by cypress and bull oak regrowth. Although they still look attractive, the large Box trees in this photo are at the end of their life, decaying, with many in a state of collapse. Competition from the dense regrowth has prevented the regeneration of replacements. There was a thinning operation in this block but it was stopped due to the moratorium. If left unmanaged, in perhaps fifty years few box trees will remain.”

Background information can be found at my blog post of April 21, 2005 titled ‘Timber Communities and National Parks (Part 1)‘ (scroll down to find it).

John Quiggin’s Publications

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Following my blog post of 26th April (Australia’s Highest Paid Blogger) John Quiggin has written to me asking that the following information be provided by way of clarification with respect to the paragraph in that blog post starting “Quiggin’s University home page gives a list of his submissions, newspaper articles, conference and …”.

“The project will develop tools for the modelling of uncertainty in the absence of probabilities and with imperfect knowledge about possible events. It will also formalise and assess the precautionary principle for the sustainable management of complex systems. Finally, the project will apply these tools to analyse and improve policies for the reform of property rights, institutions and land and water management in the Murray-Darling system. The project will assist in the formulation of sustainable responses to problems of drought and irrigation-related salinity in the Murray-Darling system.

As reported on the RSMG website, http://www.uq.edu.au/economics/rsmg/index.htm,
the project has so far produced more than 50 publications, in the Murray-Darling Basin Program and the Risk and Uncertainty Program. (The Public Policy Program relates to a separate grant). Restricting attention to the Murray-Darling, and to papers written by me, I have published 2 journal articles, 4 conference papers and 7 working papers.”

Ends.

The Hunter’s Legacy

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Greenpeace co-founder and its first President Bob Hunter died yesterday aged 63 following a battle with prostate cancer.

Hunter was a journalist by training. He wanted to stop whaling and nuclear testing and in many ways succeeded with his brand new environment group Greenpeace where others had failed.

He wanted to “affect the attitude of millions”. He approached the issues from the perspective of a media war and unashamedly used propaganda.

In an insightful review of Greenpeace’s early years, Fred Pearce has written “Greenpeace was far from being the first green group to oppose whaling. But it was the first green group to ignore the scientific arguments about whale reproduction rates, population dynamics, and how large a sustainable cull might be, in favour of an undiluted ethical argument: save the whale.”

The media war was effectively reduced to the simple issue of whether or not “whales are good”.

On the issue of nuclear testing Hunter admitted “we painted a rather extravagant picture .. tidal waves, earthquakes, radioactive death clouds, decimated fisheries, deformed babies. We never said that’s what would happen, only that it could happen”.

I have previously written about attending People for Nuclear Disarmament rallies in the early 1980s. It is for relentlessly pursuing the French and their nuclear testing program in the Pacific that I would like to thank Bob Hunter.

Messages of condolence are being posted at an online BBC site.

Interests versus Propaganda

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“The reality is that all scientists have personal ideologies, motivations and goals – all of which can potentially introduce bias into research. Scientific work should be evaluated on its merits, not on ‘conflicts of interest’ that may or may not exist,” wrote Elizabeth Whelan recently in Spiked Online.

Playing the card of ‘conflict of interest’ is perhaps playing the first rule of propaganda:

1. The rule of simplification: reducing all data to a simple confrontation between ‘Good and Bad’, ‘Friend and Foe’.

Norman Davies in Europe a History, has written that theorists of propaganda have identified four other basic rules:

2. The rule of disfiguration: discrediting the opposition by crude smears and parodies.

3. The rule of transfusion: manipulating the consensus values of the target audience for one’s own ends.

4. The rule of unanimity: presenting one’s viewpoint as if it were the
unanimous opinion of all right-thinking people: drawing the doubting individual into agreement by the appeal of star-performers, by social pressure and by ‘psychological contagion’.

5. The rule of orchestration: endless repeating the same messages in different variations and combinations.

Many of these rules of propaganda are applied in various combinations on popular blogs – but I wonder how often they are recognized as such.

The rule of unanimity (no. 4) is perhaps the card most frequently played against my work on the Murray River and also often played against ‘climate skeptics’.

And I am reminded of Henry Miller’s joke:

“How can you tell whether a whale is a mammal or a fish?” a teacher asks her third-grade class.

“Take a vote?” pipes up one of the pupils.

Back from Extinction!

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I was rather excited to read this morning that a woodpecker considered extinct since 1944 has been rediscovered. The story is at ABC Online.

According to Cornell University ornithologist Tim Gallagher, “Its like a funeral shroud has been pulled back, giving us a glimpse of a living bird, rising Lazarus-like from the grave.”

I just thought, “How Wonderful!”

It reminded me of rediscoveries in Australia: Mahogany glider, North Queensland, 1988; Leadbeaters possum, Central Highlands, Victoria, 1966.

Does anyone know of others?

Also what about recent extinctions? Does anyone know of any?

According to the 2002 ABS Measuring Australia’s Progress Report there don’t appear to have been any official extinctions in Australia during the last two decades.